44 JUNE 2019 VOGUE.COM
Up Front Adopted Family
Haunted by thoughts of my own stepmother, I buried
any rising offense. And anyway my French needed
correcting. It made me feel noble to let it go.S
téphane and I finally moved in together three
years ago, into a house in an impossibly cute
neighborhood on the eastern edge of Paris.
It was a rare find—but as couples discover
when buying their first house, trust issues have
a tendency to emerge into the open. Tensions
were made worse by particularities of French law. Since
Stéphane and I are unmarried, if anything were to happen
to him, his kids would have the right to force me to hand
over his part of the house—their inheritance—within
a year. “My family would never make you do that,” he
insisted, but I couldn’t shed a feeling of precariousness.
After we moved in, during our roughest patch so far
(and hopefully ever), a friend came to stay with us from
out of town and told me that when I stormed out after a
heated argument that Zacharie witnessed—it still pains
me to remember this—he pleaded with his father not to
ruin things. “We like her,” he said. “Don’t mess it up.”
They did like me, I could tell. We had achieved a kind
of pleasant equilibrium—especially on the nights when
Stéphane was traveling and I had them to myself. They
would do their homework, I would make dinner, we would
talk about this and that, and then everyone would go back
to their phones and computers. At bedtime they would
ask if I was coming upstairs to give them a goodnight kiss.
Marie-Pierre was always there in
case of emergency. I remember
the first time she came over for
dinner, probably two years ago,
just the two of us and the kids. I
made them fried chicken, and we
joked about American high school,
which she knew intimately from
having lived in Connecticut briefly
in her teens. I corrected the kids’
table manners and she held back,
one of countless gestures of respect
and generosity she’s extended to me since.
There was still the matter of Stéphane’s parents. What
little I knew then of intergenerational French family
dynamics came from Le Divorce, Diane Johnson’s 1997
best seller. Thankfully, Stéphane’s family isn’t anything
like the bourgeois creeps in Johnson’s novel; they are pieds
noirs, French Jews who emigrated from North Africa,
and equal parts warm and iconoclastic. When I first met
them, his mother and father welcomed me like an honored
guest, but they did so with a degree of ceremony that the
informal Californian in me took careful note of. And
immediately I envied Stéphane’s sister-in-law, who had
been around for almost 30 years and who knew where
everything went in the kitchen. I told myself to be patient;
I would find my place with time.
Stéphane’s mother, Annie, was spirited and quick-
witted. I loved her humor (when I wasn’t the target). Butthere was a time, at our house, when she lost patience
with my linguistic stumbling and asked me, with steel in
her voice, “When are you going to learn proper French?”
When I get around to it, I thought, but didn’t say.
She died, suddenly, of an apparent heart attack, on
Stéphane’s fiftieth birthday. We received the news on
the last night of vacation with the kids in the Scottish
Highlands. Stéphane struggled to make arrangements
over a spotty country mobile network as I packed our
bags, located papers, and got our shell-shocked group
back home without incident. I had lost my own father ten
years before and knew how quickly the basics of self-care
vanish in the face of that strange adrenaline rush loss can
bring. I held Stéphane’s hand and cried with him when
we went to view his mother’s body, remembering to bring
extra Kleenex, which I passed around to all assembled.
My American tendency to look everyone in the eye and
nod and hug was finally coming in handy.
Members of the extended family assembled to spend
the first week together. I steadily cooked and cleaned for
them all. Marie-Pierre pitched in as well, distracting the
kids when it all got to be too much. I realized after one
afternoon meal that this was the first time I had ever had
the full run of Annie’s kitchen. It felt like a liberation—
one I felt both guilty and a little grateful for.
The day Stéphane’s mother was buried, we all
walked the few blocks from the family home to the
cemetery. We had already been to the synagogue for
services I knew she would have hated. (While she was
proud to be Jewish, she was
fiercely secular.) Stéphane and
his brother wore the same torn
white shirts that they had had
on since the day after she died.
This was a traditional gesture
of mourning, but we weren’t
somber; a giddiness had set in.
We arrived at the graveside, and
upon finishing his recitation in
Hebrew, the rabbi brought out
a shofar. Unlike the majestic
sheep’s horns you often see, this was a miniature
version that could fit in his coat pocket, and the sound
it made was not unlike an underwater kazoo. Each of
us separately—Stéphane, his brother and sister-in-law,
and I—started giggling. We gathered together, trying to
hide our reaction, but it overwhelmed us. Soon we were
holding one another, tears of laughter and sadness
rolling down our cheeks. I knew Stéphane’s mother
would have loved that moment as much as we did.
Her picture looks out at us now, clipped to a corner
of a vintage bamboo mirror I bought Stéphane at the
Clignancourt flea market. It’s a tight close-up of her face,
smiling with benevolence and just a hint of mischief. I
know Stéphane misses her terribly. I don’t mourn her
in the same way. I can’t. But I often find myself looking
up at her and thanking her for the family she raised and
nurtured and loved. It’s now my family too. @His mother and father
welcomed me like an
honored guest, but they did
so with a degree of ceremony
that the informal Californian
in me took careful note of